The Witcher III Cost $81M

havent played witcher 3, but i couldnt play 1 or 2 for more than an hour (hated the combat). will probably give it a shot down the road.

~1/10 of a billion dollars to develop and market one game just seems silly. at that point, its more "business development" than "game development". i know thats the reality of AAA titles these days, but it seems... i dont know, a bit wrong.

gta5 cost ~$250 million! 1/4 of a billion dollars! gta4 cost less and was a much better game, IMO.

i guess im just scared gaming will turn into the movie industry where big budget crap will be a profitable spectacle during its release, but is critically remembered as crap.

I bought Witcher 1 and 2 over a year ago on a GoG sale. Had a hard time getting into it for similar reasons.

Just this week I finally got over the starting annoyance curve in Witcher 1. For me the two biggest annoyances are:

#1: Nauseating camera. I played all the Bioware fantasy RPGs (BG1/BG2/NWN/NWN2/DAO/DA2) and they give you decent control of the camera. Despite Witcher 1 using the NWN engine, they decided to mess up the camera, so it auto rotates all the time. This makes me queasy.

#2: Click-Rhythm combat. It is like they couldn't decide if they wanted to make a beat em up that was button mashing, and reflex based, or classic RPG based on stats, so they went half in on both, and annoyed a lot of people.

I put up with both of these because it has better atmosphere and story than any of the Bioware RPGs I have played. Really can't wait to get in a few more hours tonight.
 
Everything I've ever heard in the last decade+ has been that retail margins are razor thin on games. Only reason Gamestop can stay in business is used sales makes them money.

Retail markup is about 100% usually. So a $60 game cost them $30. The issue with margins is net margins, not gross margins. Running a retail business is expensive. Rent, salaries, taxes, utilities, advertising, etc all add up real fast. So while you might sell a product for twice the price you paid, after you take out the costs of doing business you end up with little profit. A 100% gross margin translates in to maybe a 3-5% net margin in a successful retail business.

My parents ran a small quilt shop for awhile and their normal markup was about 100% and for all that, they didn't make money. They did around $800,000/year in sales at their peak, but the $350,000ish after that all got eaten up with the costs of doing business.

Hence why DD is so attractive for games.
 
I bought Witcher 1 and 2 over a year ago on a GoG sale. Had a hard time getting into it for similar reasons.

Just this week I finally got over the starting annoyance curve in Witcher 1. For me the two biggest annoyances are:

#1: Nauseating camera. I played all the Bioware fantasy RPGs (BG1/BG2/NWN/NWN2/DAO/DA2) and they give you decent control of the camera. Despite Witcher 1 using the NWN engine, they decided to mess up the camera, so it auto rotates all the time. This makes me queasy.

#2: Click-Rhythm combat. It is like they couldn't decide if they wanted to make a beat em up that was button mashing, and reflex based, or classic RPG based on stats, so they went half in on both, and annoyed a lot of people.

I put up with both of these because it has better atmosphere and story than any of the Bioware RPGs I have played. Really can't wait to get in a few more hours tonight.

Regarding the camera, did you know you can switch to isometric view in-game? The common thing seems to be to use isometric for combat and over-the-shoulder for everything else.
 
Regarding the camera, did you know you can switch to isometric view in-game? The common thing seems to be to use isometric for combat and over-the-shoulder for everything else.

Anyone who has problems with camera would dig into the modes. So I am aware in detail what they all do. All the modes do auto rotating/rocking.

I actually went further than that. I found the tools to extract the .2da files, found the cameraeffects.2da, and camerasettings.2da and put a copies in my override folder, and tried to force a lock in the up/down angle to stop the rocking, but it didn't work.

As soon as you start moving forward it rocks back, when you stop it rocks forward and inside of building it it rocks way forward when your back is near a wall, so inside it is rocking/rolling nausea fest.

The camera sucks. They took something perfectly fine in NWN/NWN2 and made a mess of it.
 
No, I haven't and have no intention of playing them. The bits of them I've seen you Youtube (which were gross enough to just stop watching) were enough to figure out there was a paper thin plot and it relied pretty much exclusively on gore and porn to get its audience. *shrug* I know that appeals to very base, animal instincts in some people, but it's not for everyone. Some of us grow into other things.

So you judge the game based on a few bits you've seen from Youtube. Got it.

Other just opinion. Try to expand your horizons a bit mate, you sound like a prude.
 
So you judge the game based on a few bits you've seen from Youtube. Got it.

Other just opinion. Try to expand your horizons a bit mate, you sound like a prude.

Just ignore him. Look at his post history, you will realize he just hates games and gamers.
 
The problem with games like this one is that they try to be too adult. They boil down to some sweating hairball with a beard howling while he chops out something's guts in order to prove his manhood to someone so he can hump her. It's not really adult, in my opinion, and is as childish and shock-factor-y as that stupid Game of Thrones things that was basically carried along by pointless nudity and over the top gore.

This is a totally wrong impression.

I am in chapter 2 right now. There is negligible nudity and no depiction of sex in the game (Witcher 1). What happens is that in a few encounters you can pick up a woman.
Ex: a Waitress after walking her home. Protecting her from thugs and devil dogs. After you successfully walking her home, you can optionally, arrange a date for the next day, optionally show up for the date, and finally optionally spend the evening with her. If you do all those optional elements, you still get no actually visualization of sex, you just a few seconds of a playing card with nude image of the lady poping up on the screen.

If you are an extreme prude, don't pursue the women and try to sleep with them. Even if you do, there is no real sex in the game. It is so negligible as to be meaningless, but I wish it wasn't there, but only because it gives some prudes the wrong impression when they hear about it.

As far as violence and gore. It is a medieval sword fighting game killing things with swords is kind of violent, but the gore level is very low IMO (much less than Dragon Age).

IMO after playing Dragon Age Origins and DA2, I find the story in Witcher better and much more involving. It feels like a much more realistic depiction of a medieval society, a more cohesive and interesting world. I find the scenery looks more realistic in many ways despite being an older game using an older engine.

A must play for fantasy RPG fans (if you can tolerate the camera/combat).
 
I got a couple hours invested in it. I've been playing on the hardest level since the start. I think a lot gamers play on the normal levels and get bored. If it takes you a half an hour to down a draconid (without getting killed) you know you're having fun. I think it's a good game. I'll tell you what, I'm a quarter finished and already this game has tons of material. I was actually wondering what it cost to make the game myself at one point it has so many cut scenes and dialogue scenes. The cities and towns are more "authentic" than I've seen. NPCs have much varied dialogue.

It lacks the charm of Skyrim ... <---- you don't have clever dots to follow to guide you and Skyrim, at least in the beginning felt like, anything could happen if you walked in the woods; more surprising discovery.

I like the combat and camera btw.
 
Some fantasy games are okay, but from what I've seen, the whole Witchthing series is just pointless gore and nudity tied to a pretty lame, half-baked story and underdeveloped characters. If they'd gone more JRPG-ish like Final Fantasy that actually had engaging characters and some in-depth interaction between them or at least aimed for like the quality of some visual novels, they could have done a much better job. I think they wasted too much time on graphics and stupid swords when they could have gone airships and fantasy-style mecha with a good world-saving backed up by a little more believable romance between characters.

You seem really opinionated for someone who hasn't played Witcher games. The game is actually a very solid RPG with some of the best developed characters you'll see. In this game there's more story than you'll see in jRPG, especially modern ones. Good jRPS are almost non existent nowadays. So please don't spew your rubbish unless you actually played these games.
 
You seem really opinionated for someone who hasn't played Witcher games. The game is actually a very solid RPG with some of the best developed characters you'll see. In this game there's more story than you'll see in jRPG, especially modern ones. Good jRPS are almost non existent nowadays. So please don't spew your rubbish unless you actually played these games.

Nope, no plans on playing that stuff. I don't need the gore or the oversexed stupid humping. That's as silly as the usual drug addict suggestion that someone should get hooked on drugs so they can have a qualified opinion about being an addict (totally been posted in this section of the forum more than once even). So no thanks, I have a lot of outside to enjoy and real life to live. Video games are something I might play when I have absolutely nothing at all else to do and playing a violent sex-festival with no storyline is not how I'd like to spend it. I'd rather enjoy my time with something that's actually fun and engages the brain a little.
 
That 81 million includes marketing costs as well. Goes to show what a competent team of developers can do.

Makes me wonder what Star Citizen will/can accomplish, they have almost reached 89 Million. Guess we will see how competent Chris Roberts and team really are.

More like Eastern Europe where Labour is cheap.

Many AAA Devs are located in the West(California, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, London , France etc) all these places have many things in common, Everything is Expensive (Taxes), these places also house many TV and film production studios(sound engineers, Animators, 3d modellers, Voice Actors, Actors and Actress's etc ) which means all all talent flock to these places.


Looking at that list, the marketing costs of some games exceeding the actual development costs is absolutely gut wrenching.

I never understood how marketing was such a big factor if you need to sell a good game. A good game will sell itself just like any other good product in any given market.

Marketing includes, Review Sites, Streamers, GDC, EGX Rezzed etc, CGI and Gameplay trailers, TV Adverts, Billboards, Adverts in Cinemas etc.
 
Retail markup is about 100% usually. So a $60 game cost them $30. The issue with margins is net margins, not gross margins. Running a retail business is expensive. Rent, salaries, taxes, utilities, advertising, etc all add up real fast. So while you might sell a product for twice the price you paid, after you take out the costs of doing business you end up with little profit. A 100% gross margin translates in to maybe a 3-5% net margin in a successful retail business.

My parents ran a small quilt shop for awhile and their normal markup was about 100% and for all that, they didn't make money. They did around $800,000/year in sales at their peak, but the $350,000ish after that all got eaten up with the costs of doing business.

Hence why DD is so attractive for games.

Retail margin on games is about 1%.

Not sure which butt you pulled 100% out of, but it was definitely from one.
 
More like Eastern Europe where Labour is cheap.

Many AAA Devs are located in the West(California, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, London , France etc) all these places have many things in common, Everything is Expensive (Taxes), these places also house many TV and film production studios(sound engineers, Animators, 3d modellers, Voice Actors, Actors and Actress's etc ) which means all all talent flock to these places.




Marketing includes, Review Sites, Streamers, GDC, EGX Rezzed etc, CGI and Gameplay trailers, TV Adverts, Billboards, Adverts in Cinemas etc.

Holy Necro Batman! :p
 
Man I thought I was having a seizure....Seeing a Thread on FPN that has both "Steve" and CreepyUncleGoogle aka ScribbleKat in it brought back some memories lol.
 
So what exactly happened to CreepyUncleGoogle? I actually miss the guy. Very idiosyncratic, the way he used to rile people up.
 
Retail margin on games is about 1%.

Not sure which butt you pulled 100% out of, but it was definitely from one.

From having family run retail stores, from having worked with distributors, and from just generally understanding the costs of business. Your products are only about half your costs. The rest is rent, insurance, utilities, labour (usually the biggest), debt service, deprecation, etc, etc. So when you sell something you need to bring in enough money to not only pay for it, but all that on top of it, and then hopefully eke out some profit too. If you think 1% on an item would allow that, you are dreaming. 1% is saying that for a game sold at $60, a retailer paid $59.40 and that somehow that 60 cents of revenue is enough to cover all that other shit. Not hardly. Were that the case it would also mean that any kind of sale on a game, even something like a $5 off coupon would be losing money, literally selling it for less than they paid for it. Ummm.... no.

I think maybe you are confusing markup with profit. Markup is how much a product is sold over what was paid for it, the revenue. Profit is how much is left after you've spent money on all those other things that go in to running a business. Retail profit margins are very thin, usually in the realm of 3% up to maybe 5% for a business that is well run and doing well.

But if you are convinced a retail business can make money on a 1% markup go ahead, show me how they can cram all their costs in to that 1% markup and still come out making money.
 
So what exactly happened to CreepyUncleGoogle? I actually miss the guy. Very idiosyncratic, the way he used to rile people up.
We were talking about that in GenMay actually.

He doesn’t even show up as a taggable user.
 
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